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An Unexpected Escort into the Centre of Scandal
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y mother and several other women artists were painting flamingos beside Lake Elmenteita the day I first met Solomon. It was a hot afternoon in January 2000, and they’d all gathered for tea on the veranda of my cottage in the heart of Kenya’s Rift Valley. Solomon jumped up to open the gate, barely waiting for me to emerge from my Land Rover before shaking my hand with vigour. I looked curiously at this dark, tall man with his white teeth, black piercing eyes and slightly unkempt appearance. He seemed unfazed to be the odd one out at the tea party. The only man and the only black person, Solomon was dressed in a faded red jogging suit and worn canvas shoes, topped by a leather visor hand-painted with leaves and lizards. His surname, Gitau, is a Kikuyu name, but Solomon bears little resemblance to these characteristically short, light-skinned African people. I’d heard a bit about Solomon from my mother: he’s an activist in the area they used to call Happy Valley. Back in colonial days, various shady characters had made a name for themselves in this highland valley, but today it’s the name of Solomon Gitau which is spoken with hushed cadences of scandal. His outspoken defence of the area’s last remaining colobus monkeys and their vanishing forest habitat had incurred the wrath of his neighbours and the local authorities, especially
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when he interfered with a lucrative illegal poaching operation. He was called ‘monkey man’, branded mad by most of his neighbours. I knew that despite having no regular income, he battled to replant trees in the area lying between the Rift Valley and the Aberdare Mountains, while also providing a voice for the wild forest creatures. He’d been brutally tortured by the authorities because of his outspoken determination, repeatedly threatened and sabotaged, yet had continued undeterred, starting up conservation groups throughout the area and beyond, somehow maintaining his optimistic determination to succeed in saving a largely forgotten area’s natural heritage. Today if occasional visitors drive through Happy Valley, it’s usually en route to the Aberdare National Park, where most of the remaining wildlife fled as the area’s human population grew massively after Kenya’s independence. A year previously Solomon had written his life story by hand and given it to my mother to edit, as he finds writing in English difficult. I’d glanced at the old exercise book with its grubby newspaper cover without much interest, but once I had opened it and read a few paragraphs, I had immediately felt compelled to finish the strangely gripping autobiography. Solomon was born in the heart of Happy Valley – just before the last of the white settlers left – and his story is extraordinary. It’s surprising that Kenya’s table-like range of volcanic mountains are still commonly called by their British colonial name, the Aberdares, even though after independence they were officially renamed the Nyandarua Range. These mountains rise to 13,120 feet, while close by, a little further west, is the smaller, hunched-looking Kipipiri mountain, rising to 10,987 feet. Happy Valley is the high green valley tucked between the two, spreading out to encompass the surrounding area to the north and west. Now it is densely populated by African farmers, most of whom were born long after the departure of the hedonistic clique of white colonials who lived there for a mere handful of decades. The British East Africa Protectorate, part of which became the Kenya Colony, attracted plenty of aristocratic, adventurous and rebellious white settlers in the first decades of the twentieth century.
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A handful of them, Happy Valley’s wife-swapping set, used the space and freedom of Kenya’s breathtaking landscapes to behave with wild abandon, tarring their fellow settlers with the dubious reputation associated with one particularly promiscuous clique. This circle’s transitory zenith of the 1920s and 1930s, with their sex, drugs and finally the murder mystery concerning the death of an earl in 1941, is framed enticingly by the surrounding century of dramatically colourful history, which also perhaps contributes to the continued seduction of world attention by this attractive former colony straddling the equator. There’s the land question too. Kenya’s Kikuyu tribe, feeling robbed of their country’s best land, initiated and fought a guerrilla war in the 1950s. Known as Mau Mau, it made the headlines daily in Britain. The Kikuyu are the largest tribe in Kenya, albeit only one of forty-plus in the country. Kenya’s first and third presidents were Kikuyu, and as it happens today’s Happy Valley is populated by Kikuyu. An indefinable mystique hangs about that dissolute clique of white settlers who tarnished the name of Happy Valley between the wars, their salacious antics supposedly taking priority over farming. But as Elspeth Huxley, that seasoned writer on Kenya, pointed out in her book Forks and Hope: Gin-soaked as they were, they enhanced rather than damaged the natural charms of their valley by leaving the native trees alone and creating gardens of outstanding beauty, by paddocking green pastures for butter-yellow Guernseys, stocking streams with trout and building attractive, rambling, creeper-festooned bungalows of local timbers with shingle roofs.
Besides, decadent behaviour wasn’t totally restricted to Happy Valley. Aristocrats and royals from all over the world were joining in the fun. Edward, Prince of Wales, and his brother Henry, Duke of Gloucester, came to Kenya on hunting safaris in 1928 and 1930, their conquests not restricted to the animal kingdom. Dashing pilot and racehorse trainer Beryl Markham, the first woman to fly solo from England to America, probably scores best here. Her many lovers
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included Lord Erroll, professional hunter Baron Bror Blixen (married to Karen of Out of Africa fame) and the Hon. Denys Finch Hatton (also the lover of Karen Blixen, and an inspiration for her book). Tall, blonde and beautiful, Beryl – already on her second marriage after a bohemian upbringing in Kenya – managed to have affairs with the Prince and Duke simultaneously, eventually being paid off by Buckingham Palace to stay out of the way for life! But it’s on Happy Valley that interest still focuses. Scandal in Kenya had taken on a new dimension in 1923. It was in that year Lady Idina Hay arrived to settle in the area: she was twice divorced and eight years older than her latest husband, the attractive and aristocratic Hon. Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll. Idina was destined to become Happy Valley’s Mistress of Ceremonies, while her third husband’s penchant for sexual variety was no inhibitor. Add in Alice de Janzé, spoilt American heiress married to a French count, plus a few other moneyed undesirables, and here the real Happy Valley stories begin. Happy Valley’s heyday was brief, although it outlasted Idina’s third marriage. In 1939, at the start of the Second World War, Josslyn Hay, now Lord Erroll – his second wife Mary, Countess of Erroll, having died from a lifestyle of excessive drink and drugs – was busy conducting his affair with another married woman, Phyllis Filmer. The affair terminated with the arrival in Kenya of the newly married Sir Jock and Diana Broughton at the end of 1940. They rented a house in Nairobi’s leafy suburb of Karen, named in honour of Baroness Karen Blixen after she left Kenya in 1931. Sir Jock Delves Broughton was thirty years older than his striking blonde wife. They had a written agreement that he would not hold her back if she met somebody else – which she immediately did. Diana fell madly and very publicly in love with Erroll – and he seemed to return her feelings. Idina, Phyllis and that other notorious flame of Erroll’s, Alice de Trafford, formerly de Janzé, united in their dislike of Diana. Two months later, in the pale light of dawn, some passing Africans found Erroll dead, with a bullet in his brain, tucked in the foetal position in the footwell of his Buick – which had almost toppled into a roadside murram pit, about a mile from the Broughton home.
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After wining and dining at Nairobi’s most popular colonial meeting place, Muthaiga Club, with Diana, her husband and a friend, Erroll had taken Diana dancing, had a quick romp with her at his Muthaiga house, and finally dropped her home in the small hours of the morning. Muthaiga is a suburb on the opposite side of Nairobi to Karen, but in the dead of night there wouldn’t have been any traffic. Erroll had evidently begun driving back to Muthaiga when somebody had intercepted him. Or had his killer been hiding in the back of his car? Or perhaps he was shot at Broughton’s house, then his body driven away by the murderer or an accomplice? Sir Jock was arrested and charged with Erroll’s murder, leading to the longest trial central Africa had ever known – three weeks. The world was at war, which made the headlines from the colony doubly embarrassing. Meanwhile, police evidence was patchy and poorly handled. In retrospect, this too was suspicious. In preparation, Diana flew to South Africa to meet the ballistics expert and get herself an entirely new wardrobe – something eyecatching and different for every day of the trial. In Muthaiga Club, the atmosphere was charged with apprehension – would her cuckolded husband be the first white man to hang in Kenya? During the trial, Alice, Idina and Phyllis dressed up in their best and sat together, glaring at Diana’s beautifully clad back. No doubt plenty of other women in court fantasised about hurling invisible poisoned arrows at her too. If any of them knew anything about the murder, they never let on. Or had they simply all been too drunk that fateful night to remember what had happened? Nothing was concluded and nobody was found guilty, but ever since there has been much speculation as to Erroll’s killer and the motive, and endless research has gone into seeking the truth. The Happy Valley hype has also kept the stories alive: far more than if the victim had been just a hard-working, happily married settler. Sir Jock killed himself the following year. Diana Broughton, meanwhile, grieved for two years before marrying the reclusive and rich landowner, Gilbert Colville. She even persuaded him to buy her the home where her late lover had lived with his wife Mary.
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In 1955, fourteen years after the murder, Diana married a fourth time; this time the man she chose was Lord Delamere, Colville ’s best friend and neighbour. Almost a century later, that irresistible intrigue still lingers on from the heyday of Kenya’s infamous Happy Valley, two giddy decades that climaxed in the unresolved murder of Lord Erroll. Controversy remains, although many authors have come up with theories since the first whodunnit book, James Fox’s White Mischief (1982) – made into a major feature film starring Charles Dance, Greta Scacchi and Joss Ackland – reignited interest in the case. The man (some say woman) who fired a bullet into the brain of the philandering earl died with his (or her) secret. Surprisingly, perhaps, none of the other members of the hedonistic Happy Valley inner circle ever kissed and told either. Solomon was a small boy when Kenya became independent from British rule in 1963: white settlers were leaving and their farms were being divided up and allocated to native Kenyans. As the years passed, he watched the rapid population growth of his own Kikuyu people as they spurred on mindless destruction of the indigenous mountain forests. Today the continued demise of the trees causes formerly reliable rivers to alternately dry up and flood, washing down valuable topsoil into the lakes of the Rift Valley. Solomon’s book has no happy endings. After exchanging pleasantries with the other guests, I asked Solomon about his conservation work, carried out on an entirely voluntary basis. He talked without restraint, his husky voice rising and falling musically, fraught with conviction and emotion. His poor English surprised me – I’d expected this man, who very clearly intends to change things, to be more sophisticated. Rural Kenyan subsistence farmers tend to have more immediately pressing problems than saving trees or wild animals, which respectively represent bags of charcoal and pests. Like the majority of Kenya’s rapidly growing rural population, Solomon has always lived in a simple homestead with no electricity or running water; there are few maintained access roads or other communications, and the inhabitants’ educational opportunities are limited.
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He gesticulated with thin, sensitive hands, smiling broadly as he talked passionately about monkeys and trees, but frowning suddenly when he mentioned the mounting threats to both. There was something dynamic about Solomon: his enthusiasm, winning smile and positive attitude were infectious. We paused to listen to the sing-song bray of the zebra. A bachelor herd of impala were jumping through the thorn bush, kicking up the dust into a cloudless, blue sky. I asked Solomon about his ‘book’, whose story he had introduced with an unexpected comparison: If you don’t know Happy Valley, try to visit the area. All around Happy Valley are many historic houses. The spirits of the dead white people who used to live in these houses are living on in the African people who live there now . . . As I read the book White Mischief I saw that there is no big difference between these white people and the modern African living in Happy Valley.
The air was dry and I could smell something dead – the hyenas and jackals would be out tonight. Apart from the indomitable scarlet bougainvillaea bushes, my garden was like a desert. I thought about how unlikely it seemed for a black Kenyan to display any interest in a set of colonial characters who appeared to have attracted posthumous fame by doing nothing constructive, yet our conversation over cups of tea and scones with Cape gooseberry jam (made by one of the artists) soon switched from Solomon’s book to the old houses in Happy Valley. Today’s significant landowners in Happy Valley are vastly wealthy black politicians, in spite of constant low mutterings about the source of their gains. In the former farming lands dubbed the ‘white highlands’ – which surround and include Happy Valley – it’s not uncommon to find a farm owned by a powerful politician, an absentee landlord with numerous other business interests. While his wife flies to Europe to buy designer clothes and his children are privately educated in Britain or America, his farm workers are seldom paid much above the minimum
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wage for unskilled labour, living on less in a month than their boss will spend on a bottle of imported Champagne at Muthaiga Club. The passenger train, ‘the lunatic line’, originally built by the British at vast expense, no longer runs daily from Mombasa to Nairobi, nor on to Kisumu. The tiny station at Gilgil in the Rift Valley was once the stepping-off point for white passengers headed for Happy Valley and beyond, who usually paused at the Gilgil Hotel, opened in 1920 by Lady Colville, mother of Gilbert and briefly mother-in-law to Diana. Today few passengers disembark at Gilgil and none of them are white. The Gilgil Hotel, having changed ownership several times, after Kenya’s independence became a brothel, is scathingly referred to as the ‘Moulin Rouge’ by Gilgil’s white community. Today it provides squalid dwellings for many families in an expanding, increasingly scruffy roadside town which became flooded with internally displaced Kenyans during the post-election violence at the beginning of 2008. Up the various roads from Gilgil to Happy Valley, the land remains predominantly in Kikuyu hands. The population grows steadily, the farms become smaller, creating an intricate patchwork landscape, their edges blurred by non-indigenous fast-growing trees. The forest recedes, and the Aberdares and Kipipiri regularly burn. ‘I can take you to the Happy Valley,’ said Solomon, helping himself to another scone. ‘You can write the story!’ I’d always wanted to explore the area: I’d read White Mischief, which told of a house called Clouds that had been the headquarters for wild sessions of carousing before you traded in your husband for a night with somebody else’s. I was dubious about unearthing yet another who-killed-the-Earl-of-Erroll theory, let alone replaying what went on at those parties thrown by Lady Idina. But the prospect of seeing Happy Valley’s old, abandoned homes was interesting. So was the idea of getting to know Solomon and finding out what had inspired him to follow so single-mindedly such an unusual bent. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, ‘The use of history is to give value to the present hour and its duty.’ But I’d add Goethe’s view, that the ‘best thing which we derive from history is the enthusiasm that it raises in us’.
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Clouds was still standing, people said. Somebody had seen it from the air, but nobody knew how to get there by road. ‘You won’t see a white face there nowadays,’ an elderly, retired white farmer had warned. ‘All those roads are appalling!’ another had cautioned. ‘In this day and age, you’ll get mugged in that area – it’s all Kikuyu country now!’ the farmer had continued. ‘You mustn’t go alone.’ ‘You ought to find somebody who has a gun to accompany you,’ an even more twitchy old-timer had said to me. Solomon certainly doesn’t have a gun – I can’t imagine him killing a cockroach. But his wanderings through the area on foot have familiarised him with the whereabouts of all the decaying ruins, once people’s homes. And his native language is Kikuyu, making him the perfect guide. ‘When you see these old houses of white people,’ Solomon said conspiratorially, ‘then you will want to write the true histories!’ I was less sure. At this point he was just a potential guide into an area which had always had some mysterious allure for me. ‘There are some stories,’ continued Solomon, widening his eyes. ‘Terrible stories. You will be the first white person to hear.’ ‘You can write about the old houses,’ suggested one of the artists, adding a few touches to her picture of flamingos. A sudden gust of dry wind blew clouds of dust on to the veranda and we covered our teacups with our hands.
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